Buffalo Rising Online

Aug 19th, 12:01pm By George Lawrence

In his 2007 book City on the Edge, Mark Goldman describes the paradox of progress in Buffalo: Sometimes, to move towards a brighter future for the city, it’s crucial to embrace the treasures of Buffalo’s past. The promise for a new Buffalo, he writes, lies where “an awareness of the past and a belief in the future inspire people to identify with a place and to dedicate themselves to its improvement.”

This is true downtown, for example, where the Erie Canal Harbor offers visitors a walk through the ruins of a place that made Buffalo’s emergence possible many years ago, but sat buried and forgotten ever since.

It’s certainly true when thinking about the Olmsted park system in Buffalo, as well. When it was first designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 1800s, the six parks, eight connecting parkways, and nine circles provided a stunning green sanctuary in the midst of a booming city. During the 1901 Pan American Exposition, Buffalo was celebrated not only as the City of Light, but the City of Trees, and Olmsted once declared Buffalo “the best designed city in the country, if not the world.”

During much of the last century, unfortunately, the Olmsted park system suffered greatly—it was encroached upon during the highway-building boom of the 1950s and 60s, when Delaware Park and many connecting parkways were sliced and diced by Route 198, and the Olmsted parks fell into disrepair as the surrounding neighborhoods declined.

But in 1978, a group of citizens dedicated to preserving this jewel of Buffalo’s past joined together and created Friends of the Olmsted Parks—the group was small, and began simply with citizens protesting even further encroachment into the Olmsted Parks; one of their first actions was preventing the Buffalo Zoo from expanding parking further into Delaware Park.

Over the years, however, that small group has blossomed into the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, a major Buffalo non-profit which just announced a plan to invest almost a half-billion dollars into the Olmsted park system, including $28.6 million in just the next five years. Known as the Plan for the 21st Century, the aim is to protect and restore Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Buffalo’s park system. The report records that “this vision connected unique parks with ribbons of green that ran through the city’s residential neighborhoods, bringing the parks to the people.”

The Plan for the 21st Century was years in the making, and aims to carefully and thoroughly restore the Olmsted parks to resemble “the original vision that this master landscape artist had for Buffalo,” said Thomas Herrera-Mishler, the new CEO of the Conservancy.

Herrera-Mishler said he believes Frederick Law Olmsted’s work is “on par with Van Gogh or any other 18th century master. The parks system he designed for Buffalo is a gift that should be restored so that future generations get to enjoy this resource as well.”

The plan is 198 pages long (and available at www.buffaloolmstedparks.org), containing scrupulous detail on how to restore each of the parks and parkways that belong to Olmsted’s system. And not all of the plans are small ones—some dramatic changes are in the works.

Younger Buffalonians may not realize that Delaware Park (originally known simply as “The Park”) is actually one continuous greenspace, stretching from the big meadow bordered by Parkside Avenue, Amherst Street, and Nottingham Terrace, all the way to Hoyt Lake and the Rose Garden near the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Until the four-lane Scajaquada expressway sliced the big park in half when it was built in 1960, what now appears to be two separate parks, was once one. As part of the Plan for the 21st Century, the Conservancy aims to support and participate in turning the Scajaquada Expressway into a parkway. By the year 2014, they envision much slower traffic, pedestrian crossings and extensive landscaping along the median.

Further improvements in the 350-acre Delaware Park include a $250,000 grant secured by New York State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt for landscape and water quality improvements at Hoyt Lake. The lake is named after the assemblyman's father, who lead a massive clean-up and restoration of Hoyt Lake in the 1970s. Additionally, the Conservancy is partnering with the Albright-Knox on landscaping that will more gracefully join the gallery grounds to Delaware Park.

The plan is not simply limited to Delaware Park, of course—it contains extensive planning for a massive restoration of all Olmsted Parks, from Riverside, to Martin Luther King Jr. Park on the East Side, to Cazenovia and South Parks in South Buffalo, to Front Park on the waterfront. Rehabilitation of the nine parkways that connect these bigger parks is also planned.

The aim, simply put, is to connect all the neighborhoods of Buffalo with greenspace—a democratic vision for public spaces that anybody can gather in, to exercise and play. “People throughout Buffalo really love these parks,” Herrera-Mishler said. “They’re beloved. They’re a common meeting ground for people.”

The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy isn’t only living in the future, as much of its energy is focused on maintaining the parks now. The Conservancy entered into an historic partnership with Erie County in 2004 when, in the midst of the county’s financial crisis, the Conservancy took over the management, operations and maintenance of the Olmsted Parks. Simply a non-profit advocating for the protection of the parks at the time, it became the first not-for-profit in the nation to manage a park system.

To accomplish the massive task of actually maintaining the entire Olmsted Parks system—from planting and trimming trees and other greenery, to cutting the grass, to repairing damage from storms or vandalism—the Conservancy uses a model pioneered in New York City, in the world-famous Central Park (which was also designed by Olmsted).

The model is called the Zone Management System. The Conservancy divided the Olmsted Parks into a series of zones, ranging from 10 to 50 acres. A gardener is hired to maintain each zone; every weekday, for eight hours a day, this person tends to the needs of their area. The Conservancy says this brings “accountability and pride in ownership to the parks.” And the results have been dramatic.

The model is a logistical triumph, but also a philosophical one, as the Conservancy says it’s dedicated to involving the public at every step of the way. Herrera-Mishler cited the example of the trees in Soldier’s Circle, that were destroyed in the infamous thundersnow of 2006. Much of the plantings on the ground were designed for shaded growth, and quickly died without the tree cover. In planning a new look for the circle, the Conservancy got extensive historical information about what it once looked like, then took that information to the residents living near the circle, soliciting their input on what should be planted. In addition, the citizen-filled Olmsted Advisory Council played a key role in creating the Plan for the 21st Century.

Park restoration may seem to some a trivial cause, but that’s not the case when one of the world’s most famous landscape artists designed your city’s park system. And, as Herrera-Mishler points out, it’s good for economic growth as well. “We really see the Olmsted Parks as a pretty vital link in the present enhancement of quality of life in Buffalo,” he said. “It’s not fluff, it’s investment. It makes it possible to attract more businesses and residents to the area.”

As the Conservancy resurrects Buffalo’s history as the City of Trees, present-day Buffalo will form along the edges of this dramatic greenspace, creating an altogether new dynamic for the city. And that interplay between Olmsted’s century-old vision and the possibilities of a new Buffalo is crucial.

As Olmsted himself once wrote: It is a common error to regard a park as something produced complete in itself, as a picture to be painted on a canvas. It should rather be planned as one to be done in fresco, with constant consideration of exterior objects, some of them quite at a distance and even existing as yet only in the imagination of the painter.